PHP has excellent development experience. After updating your code, you can just reload the page. That's it. It's seamless. This is something that I sorely miss now that I'm a .NET developer.

Also, the PHP ecosystem is friendly to beginners. Compare these authentication docs for a PHP project vs a .NET project:

Laravel (PHP): https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/authentication ASP.NET Core (.NET): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authen...

> After updating your code, you can just reload the page. That's it. It's seamless.

This is available with many other languages as well, i.e. https://github.com/cosmtrek/air

It may require an external tool, but the deployment experience is a lot simpler for Go than PHP.

I think in all the critical pain points all relatively popular languages used for web development have a well thought out story. I think there's nothing about the "pipeline" that's a huge bottleneck for a well-seasoned developer anymore. At least there shouldn't be. It's more about (a) getting things spec'd out well, and (b) execution.

So the claim was that PHP "gotchas" are a drain on productivity. I'm not trying to compare with other languages, but I think my anecdata shows that, at least in my case, when you understand the tools PHP can be a very productive one.

Certainly gotchas are a drain on productivity. But I don't think this applies more to PHP than any other language I've used. The fact is, if you are less familiar with the language then you won't be as productive.

I personally spend a lot of time hopping among technologies and I always lean heavily on documentation. PHP has pretty good documentation, and this helps a lot in my opinion. I would guess that a lot of developers don't read the docs and just assume that something in a less-familiar language will work exactly like they expect it to, and then call this a "gotcha" when it doesn't.

Why is php development quicker?

Because of spaces vs tabs additional overhead. Packages vs built-in libruaries. RAD frameworks like laravel vs Django.